Google Analytics Referral Spam Tool

Your Google Analytics are showing a ton of fake traffic from bad domain names, and you have to clean it up. If you already know how to exclude bad referrers, then you know that entering just one domain filter is a time sucker, so this page will save you a LOT of time.

What is the problem?

Spam referrals showing in Google Analytics have made your referral counts irrelevant with hugely inflated numbers. Sites like 4webmasters.org, free-share-buttons.com and over 70 others are badly distorting your stats. In the case of a local business, more than half of their referral traffic can come from these “fake” websites!

What is The Solution?

There are various methods of removing these intrusions that have been written about, including creating Analytics filters, creating Analytics Segments, or even blocking the calls via your .htacess file, which really does nothing for these “ghost” referrers that don’t actually hit your site. I’ll write about two, creating “Filters” and creating a “Segment”.

Option 1 – Adding Filters (Does *not* clean historic data)

Note that a filter is a permanent change to your data, and cannot be undone. For that reason, you may prefer option two below.

This video shows you how to manually add domain filters from your in your Google Analytics reports, and then it shows how to save an enormous amount of time using this tool, by importing filters for 70+ and growing known spam domains directly into any linked Google Analytics account.

Using this method will alert the viewer in Google Analytics that the view is being filtered, which I believe is a good thing in some cases. However, it won’t do anything for your historical data prior to the date you added the filter.

Our Tool – (But I recommend Option 2 Instead)

Get started by clicking the initialize button below. You will be asked to authorize access to your Google Analytics data, and you will then see the available domains for filter importation. Use CTRL to select multiple domains.

Using this method will simply “clean up” the historical data, and can show you multiple segments at the same time, which you may find preferable in most situations. In the video I show how it’s done, but you can hit the button below to “initialize” and you’ll be taken directly to the latest version.

As I showed in the video, you can go to the Google Solutions gallery for the most current segment, or you can import mine by pressing the button – (last updated Sept 25, 2015).

Did This Save You Time?

The source of our original Google Analytics referral spam domain list is at Lone Goat, but we have added our own observations, and will continue to update. If either of these two solutions above need more domains added, leave the details in the comments.

Sure, please feel free to just post them here as a comment, or you could email them to me at scott(at)searchcommander.com. I can’t promise we’ll add them all, but i’ll certainly take a look at them and decide from there…